Daceton armigerum
| Daceton armigerum | |
|---|---|
 |
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| D. armigerum worker from Brazil | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Hymenoptera |
| Family: | Formicidae |
| Subfamily: | Myrmicinae |
| Genus: | Daceton |
| Species: | D. armigerum |
| Binomial name | |
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Daceton armigerum (Latreille, 1802) |
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| Synonyms | |
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Formica armigera Latreille, 1802 |
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Formica armigera Latreille, 1802
Daceton armigerum is a Neotropical species of arboreal ants, distributed throughout northern South America. D. armigerum combines several traits generally noted in some other arboreal ants i.e., populous colonies, large and/or polydomous nests, intra- and interspecific aggressiveness, trophobiosis, and capturing prey by spread-eagling them.
D. armigerum has a complex continuously polymorphic caste system, in which smaller workers nurse the brood and larger workers hunt, dismember prey items, and defend the nest. The workers have trap-jaw, hypertrophied mandibles that snap together, triggered by sensory hairs situated on the labrum and powering a killer bite. The polymorphism of the worker caste is dramatic, and the size-frequency unimodal (monophasic allometry); foraging workers, themselves highly polymorphic, are larger than those from inside the colony. Workers are so well adapted to arboreal life that when they fall from the forest canopy they are able to glide down onto the trunk of their host tree.
The species is distributed throughout northern South America and is known to occur in the terra firma and flooded forests of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad, and Venezuela.
D. armigerum usually nests in cavities in the branches and trunks of trees previously bored by beetles and other insects. The colonies, which are polygynic (multiple queens) and polydomous (multiple nests), can reach to ca. 952,000 individuals, much more than earlier estimates of 10,000 workers suggested by Wilson (1962). The colonies likely contain multiple egg-laying queens as none of the queens observed in one study had wing stubs. Indeed, in many ant species, non-mated females that remain or return to their nests lose their wings piece by piece, leaving stubs. On the contrary, after the nuptial flight, the queens use their hind legs to tear their wings off. This is possible due to the presence of a line of predetermined weakness situated at the base of wings and results in a neat tear usually considered an indication of having mated.
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Wikipedia